Okay, here is my Tanis from the official campaign map The Dream of What Could Be (final campaign map in final campaign) with her starting army (diminished) and at a ‘deadly’ bottleneck underground. How does she get past the enemy? Note that this particular lineup is extremely dangerous. You are facing 2 legions of Trackers, which can ignore whatever defense you have. There is 1 legion of Shades, which you absolutely must kill from a distance or else their poisoned blades will kill anything you have. Only your gargoyles are immune, but you have but 100 of them. By this point I had really weak ranged attackers. And of course, nothing you have is remotely able to stand up to 69 Minotaur Guards. Or the 240 fast moving Striders.

If you are lucky the game could set you on a huge battlefield which gives you more time, but I actually won this on my first playthrough on a standard size battlefield. The Shades, Minotaur Guards and Striders charged me, so I really had very little time.

I got out of this with zero losses.

So all the hatred against Ubisoft notwithstanding, I am really starting to appreciate their work here. The Wizard faction guys look like eccentric misfits, but they really support each other.

I wish I could have saved replay of this battle, but it seems Ubisoft can’t keep up with the technology 10 years ago. Heroes V has a replay function, but VI and VII doesn’t.

1) Tania had Djinn channelers. She only had 190 mana, but the channelers helped top up her mana during battle. This is crucial because my battle could not have been won on 190 mana without substantial losses.

2) Unlike in Heroes V, Antalyan has made it in his UCP such that the Gremlins/ Cabirs can repair multiple times. In this battle it made a difference because I could not have zero casualties from constructs otherwise.

3) I didn’t fly my Simurghs into the enemy. I waited, and moved them at end of this turn so that I could hit 3 enemy stacks with free negative spells from the Simurgh.

4) Turn 1, I used Implosion first on one stack of Trackers, then fog-shielded the other stack. I used my ranged attackers to quickly reduce the un-fogged Trackers to a small number (still three digit). This bought time to fight the other guys. The remaining Trackers still killed a bunch of my Cabirs that required a casting of Regeneration later. I don’t know why AI is obsessed with targeting Cabirs. Trackers can bypass defense stats, so it is always more worthwhile to use them against powerful units with high defense.

5) Turn 1, My forces inflicted minimal damage on the big Minotaur, Shade and Strider stacks. Come on, I only have 12 Rakshasha Rajas, what do you expect? Most of the work was done by Tania.

6) Turn 2, my Simurghs are now in the middle of the enemy. I took out the most dangerous guys – the Minotaurs – with implosion. Now we see the true power of the Simurgh. It doesn’t actually do a lot of damage on its own, but it enhances your caster’s spells. My normal/ default implosion cost 24 mana (Tania has Prime Scholar) and could hit for 57% base damage. In battle with Metamagic and Simurgh adjacent, I could hit 100% with Implosion!

Then I took out the huge Shade stack with Stasis. I could have used implosion on them, but it would not kill more than half even with Simurgh adjacent. If I’d wasted my second casting on Implosion instead of Stasis, the remaining 500 Shades would have the ability to inflict thousands of hp worth of damage every turn from their poisoned blades, so they must not get a turn. They would slaughter all Simurghs within one turn!

7) I had to keep the Striders from advancing, so I used Rajas, Golems and Gargoyles to block them and sent the Djinns to take out the smaller tracker stack. The Simurghs defended against the fog-shielded Tracker stack attacking in melee, and took damage that required several turns of Regeneration. My regeneration was extra weak because I had to cast it as the second spell every turn – the first spell had to be a Prime Spell otherwise I won’t get a second turn to cast.

8) So I stasis-ed the Shades and used implosion to finish off all other enemies.

9) I had to use stasis at least five times because the Striders had done plenty of damage to my constructs and my 149 Cabir Masters needed five turns to get everyone fixed.

10) Luckily there are plenty of Trackers to sacrifice for my Djinn Channelers to replenish my mana. This battle required at least 300 mana but I wasn’t keeping good track.

11) I suspect the Trackers only ‘ignore defense’ if attacking in range. They seemed pretty weak in melee, as weak as any melee units are expected to be.

12) Once everyone was back to full health, I positioned the Simurghs next to the legion of Shades and wiped them out with one implosion.

This is another trick that you can use in H7. Use enemy units to keep the most powerful enemy stack from your main units.

H5, you can't do this. AI is smart enough not to get blocked by itself. H7, AI is utterly retarded. The minotaurs here just lost several turns because I kept my Angels on defense and never killed the enemy stacks attacking them. My ranged units just shot the Minotaurs to death.